I’m afraid that I am far too well aware of the impact of
missionary work on peoples and on their languages to be able to approve of it.
My resources are not intended to support such
work:indeed I would be dismayed if they
were used to contribute to it in any way.Honest missionaries – as I trust the vast majority of you are – will
respect my wishes and values, held as strongly and deeply as yours, and not consult my webpages.

Of course, I have no intention whatsoever of causing offence to
anyone, and earnestly hope my comments on this issue will not be taken
personally, which is not how they are meant at all.All the same, I do want to be very clear on
this.

Please note also that the views expressed on this page are purely
my own personal ones, and do not represent any official views or policy of any
organisation which may at any time host this site or link to it.

Some people who feel broadly neutral about this issue may be
surprised that I take such a strong stance on it.Aren’t missionaries generally nice people who
are trying to do good?Of course, I know
a number of them, and yes, that does apply to many of them.The real issue, though, is not whether they try
to do good, but what their activity actually ends up doing to indigenous communities
in reality.Like me, you may be in for
an unpleasant surprise on this one…

In fact I sometimes wonder myself what on earth a debate like the
one below is doing on a Quechua website.However, since I have had emails from occasional people who find this
position of mine disappointing, and completely misunderstand me, thinking that
I am not open to new ideas or to different viewpoints, I have been moved to
justify myself to those people.So just
in case you do get that impression, please do me justice and read what I have
written below to explain why I hold to this position of mine so firmly.

For a first reality check, here is something that may come as a shock
to many neutral readers, as it did to me when I first realised it.There is an organisation which calls itself
the Summer Institute of Linguistics (sil, or in Spanish the Instituto
Lingüístico de Verano, ilv),
associated also with a website that classifies the world’s languages, called
the Ethnologue.The very names they have chosen for
themselves are indicative of the fact that these two organisations deliberately
misrepresent themselves – so much so that it took me several years to realise
who they really were.They deliberately play down and even hide the
fact that their fundamental goal is not linguistic research.

If you look hard enough though, you will find out what these two
organisations are in reality.Essentially
they are American evangelical missionary movements whose real goal is to
translate the Bible into as many of the world’s languages as they can (the Ethnologue’s categorisation of languages includes
notes of whether their speakers are or are not ‘evangelised’).Whatever you think of the merits or demerits
of that goal is not even the real point here.It is the fact that these movements so deliberately avoid coming clean
on who they are and what they are trying to do.Why on earth?This alone cannot
help putting even the neutral reader at considerable unease.And this is not just institutional:I have also had first‑hand experience
of a number of missionaries in the Andes who ‘did not speak their name’, and presented
themselves simply as ‘linguists’, when in reality what they were there for was conversion,
not linguistics.

Far, far worse accusations have actually been levelled at the so‑called
Summer Institute of Linguistics.I have no idea about these, or whether they are
true or not, and I have no comment to make on them at all.I know of them only because somebody put a
link to this page of mine from the Wikipedia entry on the sil, which mentions some of those
accusations (remember, anyone is free to edit Wikipedia pages, so you have to
make your own mind up on what is said there).

First of all, note that I am generally very open to new
ideas and to different viewpoints and cultures – otherwise I would hardly have
spent much of my life travelling around the world to meet peoples of different
cultures and to learn their languages, let alone produced this website.Indeed, it is actually precisely because this
is so important to me that I cannot respect the self-appointed conviction of
missionaries that they (hmmm, how come just them?) have some divinely-given
right to meddle in cultures different to their own.

It is self-evident that everyone – including me, you, and
missionaries – just happens to have
been brought up in his/her own particular culture, within its particular set of
beliefs.What makes any one of these,
anyone’s particular set of beliefs, necessarily the only universally true ones,
rather than those of dozens of other cultures and religions?Nothing does – however comfortable it might
make certain members of each particular ‘clan’ feel to see the world in just
those terms that make them think they are specially ‘right’.Of course it is not that they are objectively, demonstrably right,
it’s just that they happen to think
they are (or ‘believe’ so, as they might prefer to say).

How is it that they can convince themselves that they – how come
just they? – just happen to be the lucky ones who know the ultimate truth, and
that it is good and right of them to believe in that?It is only the preconceptions of their own
upbringing, and the fact that of course it’s very convenient and comfortable to
believe in a self-delusion when it helps reassure yourself that you, yes
specially you, are divinely ‘right’.

I see nothing commendable in making the ‘leap of faith’ – the idea
that it is a good in itself just to ‘believe’, in something which can’t be
shown to be true.I find it particularly
telling, and distasteful, that these are almost always beliefs which, most
conveniently for those who do ‘believe’, just happen to give them a sense that
they are in some way specially ‘right’, or ‘chosen’ to know the absolute truth,
not revealed to other poor people who are unenlightened, gone astray, or just
wrong.(Missionaries have even coined a
special word to describe such poor people:they are the ‘unevangelised’ peoples.)

Most responsible, respectable people rightly condemn
self-delusions like this as unjust and potentially dangerous and evil.It is precisely the same sort of readiness to
believe in something unsubstantiable and self-flattering that leads to such
‘beliefs’ as racism, sexism, and so on.It is only religion, though, that has, most disingenuously, managed to
elevate this self-flattering delusion into a virtue, the one it calls ‘faith’.(Well it would, wouldn’t it, otherwise it
couldn’t perpetuate itself.)The same
faith that enables fanatics to justify to themselves the most horrendous deeds
that have gone with religion through the ages, and still do today.

Now of course I’m hardly suggesting that the average missionary is
an unjust fanatic.The vast majority of
missionaries I have met are clearly genuinely and deeply concerned for the
well-being of the people they are trying to convert or ‘shepherd’.But I cannot find in any way laudable their
conviction that their religion is more ‘right’ than that of the people they try
to convert – no more so than any other unsubstantiable, self-flattering ‘faith’
such as “my skin colour is better than yours”.Above all, I cannot see that missionaries’ personal and quite
unsubstantiable beliefs give them some special right to interfere, as if they
and their way of living were necessarily better than other people who therefore
need their help and need ‘converting’.The self-righteous arrogance of such convictions is simply mind-boggling
to the rest of us.*I for one am not going to argue that modern
Western evangelism is an all-round more laudable way of living than traditional
Andean culture.Indeed, in my experience
the most genuine, honest, ‘good’ people I have met in the Andes have typically
been those in the remotest villages, thankfully untouched by evangelisation of
any sort, and remaining closest to the instinctive solidarity and reciprocity
that were once so deeply engrained in native Andean culture.

Now of course it wouldn’t bother us so much if all that
missionaries achieved was to substitute one set of religious beliefs for
another.But while that may be all that
they themselves intend to do, the problem is that whether they want it or not,
in practice that is very far from the only consequence of what they do.Missionary activity has always, throughout
history, ended up accelerating the erosion and eventual destruction not only of
indigenous religious beliefs, but of indigenous culture and identity much more
widely, including their languages.Missionary activity is just another brick in the wall, and can have a
much wider psychological impact on indigenous peoples than missionaries seem to
realise, destroying more of their own culture and hastening complete
assimilation to mainstream, imported Western culture.

It is hardly a set of beliefs that originate in the Middle East
several thousand years ago, and that were brought to the Andes by the Spanish
conquistadors, that will help Andean peoples to a stronger sense of respect for
their own culture and identity.

Missionaries would also do well to bear in mind the realities
behind what they see as their ‘success’ (counted in converts).For this is achieved in a context where they
too are exploiting the relative weakness and
lack of self-confidence of indigenous cultures when faced with socially
dominant and more prestigious cultural traits brought in from outside (of which
religion is one).Why do so many missionaries
prefer to leave Western countries, where there are still plenty of people whose
“souls they could try to save”?Because
people at home are harder to convert, because they’re already wise to the
missionaries’ real objectives, and don’t come from a culture that is of
relatively weaker standing than that of the missionaries, and therefore less
able to resist the pressure and attractions of an outside culture.(Don’t forget, too, that U.S. evangelists in
particular come armed with sometimes hefty financial support from donations from
home, which can represent very significant sums of money in the context of a
poor Andean village.)

For an example of some of the effects of missionary activity in a
village in the Andes, click here.

I would call on all missionaries to think long, hard, and not
self-centredly about this:how come it
is just you, and your
particular brand of religion, that happen to be right, rather than all the
myriad others in the world?And I would
call on them truly to respect other cultures,
and beyond going to see what you can learn from them, don’t try to change them
to be more like you, and just leave them alone.(If you think I’m being unfair and you really want a debate on the
‘right’ to seek to change other cultures, click here.)

I am delighted to get emails from people all round the world, it’s
one of the great pleasures of my running this website.But not from
anyone who thinks he/she – or anyone – has some God-given right to meddle in
other cultures.If you do, then I simply
cannot share your premises, which for me defeat the whole object of being open
to others.Some people have emailed me
to try to change my views, but if you don’t share the ground rules in truly respecting the diversity in
cultures and views that I love, and not trying to change them to yours, then
I’m afraid there is simply no point in my reading emails from you.It’s just not worth either my time or yours,
so I might as well delete straight away any emails from missionaries (and
others who share their outlook) … and so I do.

I repeat that of course I mean no offence to anyone:that too would be counter to what I stand
for.Nonetheless, I simply cannot
consider worthy of respect missionaries’ self-centred self-assurance that they
have a ‘divine right’ to do what they do, and that they are somehow right, when
the rest of the world isn’t – and all this not because they actually are demonstrably right, but just because
they personally happen to believe
they are.

Answers such as I’ve had from missionaries in the past, such as “I
know I’m right to do this because it was Jesus himself who told me to”, hardly
convince the rest of the world’s population.For a start, we do not share missionaries’ belief in who Jesus was.And
it is only missionaries who are so arrogant and self-deluding as to believe
that they are so special as to have some privileged access to Jesus, and that
Jesus has specially chosen them.For the
rest of the world, what’s really going on in the missionaries’ minds is pretty
obvious to us: they are suffering from a
self-flattering figment of their own imagination, but one that’s very
convenient because it helps them feel like they’re special and real
do-gooders.We just wish all those
genuine and nice people would just snap out of it and stop contributing,
however unwittingly, to the accelerated destruction of Andean culture and
identity.

I have personal experience that this is the effective impact of
missionaries’ activities in the Andes.However well-meaning they may be, I simply cannot accept or respect the
premises on the basis of which they set out in their self-appointed
‘mission’.Experience of conversations
and emails with missionaries has shown me that if we can’t agree on the
premises, then unfortunately debate is effectively futile;my time is much better spent on expanding and
improving the content of my website, so if you’ll excuse me I will now go and
get back to doing that.

An
Example of the Effects of Missionary Activity in a Village in the Andes

The only reassuring aspect of the missionaries’ ‘success’ is that
as often as not it’s actually them that are being taken for a ride
instead.Many of their converts are not
daft, and are happy to change the religious ‘club’ that they nominally belong
to if it can get them some tangible practical benefits.Catholicism, this brand of Evangelism, that
brand of Evangelism, what do they care?It is not unusual to see tiny towns in the Andes with churches for a
panoply of half a dozen different evangelical sects or more.

Still, the dangers are very real, not least the dangers of
fragmentation.Go to Incahuasi
(Inkawasi), one of very few last endangered bastions of Quechua in northern
Peru, and speak to the locals there.As
soon as they heard that I was a linguist, their response was “Ah, you mean a
missionary?”Why did it take me so long
to persuade them that I really wasn’t?Why could they not simply just take me at my word and trust me?Because they were too used to people arriving
and deliberately, misleadingly describing themselves as linguists, but who
eventually revealed their true colours as missionaries.

If missionaries’ motives are so righteous, why do they feel they
can’t be open about them?And this is
hardly an isolated case.I came across
this same suspicion repeatedly throughout the Andes.Indeed such disingenuousness, bordering on
dishonesty, is all but institutionalised in some missionary organisations, as
far as I can tell.Take the Ethnologue and the associated so-called Summer Institute of Linguistics (sil, or in Spanish the Instituto
Lingüístico de Verano, ilv).Among linguists these organisations are
well-known for deliberately trying to play down and even hide the fact that
their fundamental goal is not linguistic research – for them that is but
a means to their real goal, which essentially bible translation and
conversion.Their funding, likewise,
seems to come essentially from religious organisations.

Once I had finally overcome the suspicion that the locals in
Incahuasi had learnt from the missionaries, to gain their trust that I was
simply telling the truth, there came an outpouring of laments about the impact
of missionary activity in their village.The missionaries had succeeded in converting a fair proportion of the
population, and by doing so had shattered its cultural unity and identity
(desperately needed in the face of the very real threat of the extinction of
their language).One significant result
of the missionary activity, for example, had been to subvert and undermine the
traditional village fiestas, frowned upon by the Evangelists missionaries
because they involved drinking.And this
in a village with – up to now – one of the most unique survivals of any aspect
of indigenous Peruvian culture:the takiy, a ritual song some
of whose verses are in the Mochica language, extinct for many decades and
living on only in the lyrics of this song.Neither language nor religion can be treated in isolation from the
larger question of indigenous culture and identity.The more you assimilate one or the other, the
more likely the rest is to follow.

An Example of the
Effects of Missionary Activity on Indigenous Political Movements

On a general level, one of the few strengths of indigenous communities
that has allowed them to hold their own in the Andean countries has
traditionally been their unity and common sense of identity and purpose (as
evidenced, for example, in communal work traditions such as mink’a).It is
widely recognised (certainly not just by linguists!) that missionary activity
typically ends up shattering this unity and common identity.This is because the each community ends up
split into two groups, those who do convert to the missionary’s beliefs (any of
a large number of minor evangelist Protestant denominations), and those who don’t,
and stick to the beliefs they grew up with (normally this means – at least nominally
– Catholicism, though often actually mixed to a greater or lesser extent with what
survives of original Andean beliefs).As
just one example of how this weakens the indigenous voice in their native
countries, here’s a quote from the leading French newspaper Le Monde (13th July
2006, page 17 – my translation from the original French).

“Religion is one of the problems facing the indigenous people”,
explains Carlos Chimborazo, director of La Prensa,
the Riobamba daily newspaper.“It’s one
more divisive factor on top of a number of others, like regional differences or
ideological choices.Pachakutiq [the
main indigenous political organisation in Ecuador], for example, represents more
the Catholics.They tend to be more
radical than the evangelicals, who usually look more for compromises and
alliances.”

For a more specific example of how a single indigenous community has
its unity shattered by missionary activity, see the next section.

Does
Anyone Have a ‘Right’ or Justification to Seek to Change Anything in Another
Culture?

Some
missionaries have taken me up on these points about the self-righteous
arrogance that is inherent in the ‘missionary’ conviction, and about the
attempt to change other cultures, since they assume – mistakenly – that I would
reject the right of anyone to seek to change anything in another culture, even
if simply by persuasion.So, here is my
view on the vexed question in the title above.I set this out so principally that no more missionaries write to me on
the crazy assumption that if I don’t share their beliefs it must be because I
haven’t even thought about these issues.(Another classic missionary self-flattering arrogance:“if other people don’t think like me it must
be because they don’t care and haven’t thought about ethical and religious
questions deeply enough.”)

Firstly, yes, of course, a case can well be made for claiming some
‘right’, or at least justification, to go campaigning to change patent evils
like wanton sadism, murder and genocide.(But you don’t need any religion to make that case.)In any case, there are thankfully not many cultures in the world that are based on these.That said, let us not forget that (like
plenty of other ‘cultures’ through history) European colonialists and their
white descendants in the USA did
indeed all but institutionalise some of these evils against native
populations.

A case can also be made, though, for campaigning against
injustices that some people claim do indeed have cultural and religious
roots.The hottest among these for most
readers of this page is no doubt the position of women under fundamentalist
Islamic regimes;for a Latin American
context, though, how about the institutionalised ‘slavery culture’ that the
Spaniards imposed on African and indigenous American peoples, and that was
conveniently justified by Christianity at the time?And some people think that they can still
help people in the Andes to become better people by replacing their culture
with Christian beliefs…?

The point is that it’s hardly as though we desperately need some religion in order to oppose patent injustices – much
less a very formal religion based on one particular set of stories from the
Middle East many thousands of years ago (yes, I do mean Christianity).There are far better justifications, and ones
that work for far more people in the world, than just ‘Jesus said not to’.Indeed, on the contrary it’s the distortion
of religion that is so often used to make convenient excuses to allow for the
injustices in the first place, just as the Spaniards used religion in Latin
America.

Above all, there is indeed an enormous difference between on the
one hand people who campaign against specific purportedly culturally-rooted
injustices or evils like slavery or female circumcision in Africa, and on the
other hand the missionary’s aim of replacing a community’s entire belief-system
for theirs, even though there is absolutely no objective evidence or
justification whatsoever for the one that they happen to want to export.Indeed, the beliefs of Christian missionaries
themselves include plenty of things that other peoples from different backgrounds
consider very weird, and indeed evils and injustices.For example, fundamentalist Christianity
tends to have plenty of views on sexuality that to other cultures seem prudish
or just plain weird (try searching for Leviticus 21:19-21 in an online bible –
is this really what people in Andean villages need translated into
Quechua?).It is revealing too that
Westerners tend to campaign much less against male (rather than female)
circumcision, because the former is generally considered far more acceptable in
their Judeo-Christian tradition than it would be to other cultures, to which it
seems an extremely weird ritualistic thing to do (as indeed it is if you look
at it objectively and without the distortion of religion and upbringing).